A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Robert Payne visited Bunting in the spring of 1949 during a cultural mission to Persia sponsored by the Asia Institute of New York, and acknowledged that he owed ‘a special debt to Mr. and Mrs. Basil Bunting of the London Times, who allowed me to keep them awake at Teheran over their own Scotch whisky on too many nights’.191 Payne had asked a Persian poet to describe the Persian sky and was told to ‘think of a waterfall of blue wine in the sunlight’:

  I spent days bathing in this waterfall in the garden of an English poet not far from Shamran, up the sloping road which eventually loses itself in the snows of the Elbruz mountains. It was a small garden, full of dying roses, for summer was coming on. There was a red-tiled swimming-pool, and the poet was credited with possessing the best cook and the best collection of whisky in Teheran. He possessed a passionate love of Persia, translated their poetry superbly, knew many Persian dialects and thought the world and ambition well lost as long as he could remain in his garden, with his exquisitely handsome Armenian wife, his books and his pipes … He had quelled a German-aided revolt of the Bakhtiari tribesmen almost single-handed, and to that extent he may have altered the course of the war, for the Germans were within an ace of succeeding in creating a foothold in Persia. I had heard about him in China. Ezra Pound had said once: ‘If I was a younger man, I would go to Teheran just to see him.’192

  In the same piece Payne also relates a conversation he had with Bunting, which demonstrates his love for the Iranian people

  ‘The people are entrancing. There is nothing in the world like them. I don’t know what it is – a strange mixture of licence and dignity. They live their lives without subterfuges; they have all the dignity of the desert Arabs without the Arab hysteria. It is the only place in the world where it is impossible to be bored. Do you remember the inscription on the tomb of Hafiz:

  “When thou passest by the head of this tomb, invoke a blessing, For this is a place of pilgrimage for all the libertines of the world.”

  They are gay and charming and effervescent – much more than the French. They know their own minds. They have decided what is due to God, and what is due to themselves. And they cannot be completely serious: as soon as they make the effort, they realise how ridiculous they are. They give the impression of knowing all the answers, as perhaps the Chinese do, and so they play, even when they are most miserable.’

  Bunting liked Payne immediately, or at least he told Dorothy Pound that he did, but he may have been being polite as she had introduced Payne to Bunting.193

  In fact Payne’s book annoyed Bunting and his position had hardened considerably by March 1953 when, desperate for work, he told Zukofsky that he wouldn’t contact Payne: ‘He is too fantastic a fool and too unblushing a charlatan for me to be indebted to him.’194 He wrote in despair to Margaret de Silver in May that he wished he ‘could write impudent nonsense like Robert Payne who seems to get at least a living by it’.195 And by 1979, ‘If you can find six consecutive words in his piece,’ he wrote to Tom Pickard, ‘which do not contain a lie or imply one I’ll be astonished … He visited Persia for fourteen days with a party of old women, and wrote a book about it within a few weeks of getting home. He knew nothing, cared nothing, kept his eyes shut tight for fear a fact or two might put him off his stride.’196

  As if to illustrate precisely Payne’s point, however, in June 1949 Bunting told Dorothy Pound a wonderful story that again suggests that Bunting would have written a pungent book about Persia:

  A friend of mine – another Ezra [Horesh] – was returning from my house to the city in a small open car, when he was hailed by an Arab crying ‘Stop’. He didn’t stop, whereupon the Arab began to abuse him thoroughly in his own language. As it happens, Ezra is bi-lingual in Arabic and Persian, so he stopped the car, beckoned the Arab over, and hit him on the head with the handle of the jack. A police car which was passing took both of them to the police station and before the magistrate. The magistrate asked: ‘Why did you hit this man on the head with the handle of a jack?’

  Ezra said: ‘Because he abused me.’ The magistrate asked: ‘What did he say?’ Ezra told him. The magistrate turned to the Arab and asked: ‘If someone said this to you in Baghdad what would you do?’ The Arab said: ‘I would rip up his belly.’

  The magistrate gave sentence: ‘I cannot let you off. You were seen to hit this man over the head with the handle of a jack, so I fine you the minimum, five tumans. If you care to pay twenty tumans you may hit him over the head with the jack itself.’197

  These were good times for Bunting and he expressed an unusual degree of contentment in his correspondence. Zukofsky wrote to William Carlos Williams from Brooklyn on 3 June 1949: ‘A letter from Basil after visiting Meshed with his young Persian bride and the Sanctuary there “done in mirror work”, along with two poems not weaker in gusto. He seems to lead an enviable life tho he says all the American journalists descended on him more or less together after he came back to Teheran.’198

  After intelligence work journalism seemed fatuous, little more than gossip. ‘Here it is hot,’ he complained to Zukofsky in June 1949 ‘and distinguished visitors keep me from my rest, chasing the news about them. Does anybody really care if the Regent of Iraq had dinner with the Prime Minister of Iran?’199 It was high level, colourful gossip though:

  Nasr. Khan Qashqai turned up at a party yesterday: first time I’ve seen him in four years, looking large as well as cunning and rather goodhumoured, with a hooky nose and incongruous brown eyes à la cow and a suit that didn’t fit him at all. I forget how many hundred thousand nomads he thinks he governs, but a lot of them go their own way and he has to make the most of it. A few years ago the tribe was really run by his thirteen year old wife, a girl of fierce and indomitable passions, sharing the name of my daughter Roudaba … And the Prime Minister, always the Prime Minister, with his arabesque of whisker, shaking hands all round and wondering each time ‘Who the devil is this now? I ought surely to know’ and disguising his ignorance with a clever set of politenesses designed to find out whether he ought to ask after the wife or who. I like the upright old Turk, and have more respect for the contents of his skull than I used to.200

  By August he was beginning to despair. He told Zukofsky that without Sima

  there’d be nothing for me in this life beyond the contact with Persia which helps to clarify Persian poetry here and there … Do you know I’ve worked seven days every week (except one when I worked six) And twelve to sixteen hours every day since February? That’s almost as strenuous as the war, and without any such motive. The prospect of even two or three days break has practically disappeared. Sima suffers by my overwork, too. I have no time to play … The Times is bellowing for two long articles, the Abadan Daily News is waiting for its weekly column, there are a dozen shorter items to be sent to Near and Far East Agency, and I have promised a report on local opinion to the Embassy … I have to make up the time we lost by obeying the royal command to be part of a huge crowd having a magnificent supper with King Abdullah of Jordania, which lasted hours and hours at my busiest time: but Sima was pleased because the little King … spoke to her and to no other female, and because there was a good puppet show and some very good Armenian dances, and because she astonished some Kurds by addressing them in their own language … I was bored, even by the whisky, but it was Sima’s first taste of splendours.201

  And by September he was finished with it. ‘I am bogged down in the price of cotton piece goods and the prospects of selling steel rails and other bloody nonsense. My ancient hatred of journalism was well justified.’202

  The good times were coming to an end. A three-day trip through the forests of Mazanderan and ‘over the spectacular pass from Chalus’203 wasn’t much compensation for the fact that Teheran’s charm was beginning to fade. With only seven free days since the previous February he was beginning to feel that his time was up, especially with Sima eight months pregnant with their first child. Money was becoming short and he calculated that by March his
earnings would be the equivalent of the salary he had paid his chauffeur when he had that luxury at the embassy. He tried to find work with the Anglo Iranian Oil Company but discovered that it applied strictly a policy of not recruiting anyone over the age of forty. He summed up his employment prospects in a burst of prescience:

  Roughly, from the employer’s point of view, I am a man who was a writer, with a little political experience in extreme youth, very varied journalistic experience (but none in the office), a successful military career, some years of diplomacy and the prestige of the ‘Times’ job here. I am an ‘expert’ on the Middle East, on literature and on counterespionage … none of which is awfully urgently required in business. It is held that the high positions I have filled disqualify me for subordinate ones, which is unfortunate. I have ‘administered’ a fairly large organisation (however I hate administration). Might be a very good policeman or professor or leader-writer or reviewer (though by now bored with most books). I know by experience that my political judgment is much shrewder than most mens, that I can detect, often where others cant, that I can write very clearly about complicated matters and remain interesting, that I am capable of long periods of extremely hard work … and that I cannot sit in an office for very long without chafing.204

  His diagnosis was accurate and his condition would blight the next fifteen years of his life.

  Meanwhile, in February 1950 Sima-Maria Bunting was born, Bunting’s first child with Sima. Sima had insisted on Maria so Bunting ‘stuck Sima on in front to distinguish her from ten million other Marias’.205 Finally in April 1950 he told Dorothy Pound that he would return to Britain in three days time: ‘I lost (chiefly through the sin of not having joined twenty years ago) the job which provided most of my money, and the Times had none worth mentioning, though Hugh Astor swore that he would make them at least double my pay.’206 Hugh Astor was then deputy Middle East Correspondent for The Times and since his father was the proprietor and Chairman of the newspaper he was in a good position to fulfil his promise. At this time Bunting hadn’t fallen out with The Times and he wrote of Astor as ‘a pleasant young chap with a brain’.207 Given his subsequent treatment by The Times, and the fact that Astor was on the board by 1956, it isn’t surprising that he makes, as we shall see, an unflattering appearance in Briggflatts. In spring 1950, however, Bunting was looking to ingratiate himself with the Astors in order to secure future employment at The Times. He went so far as to ‘wilily’ import into the UK caviar and vodka for Hugh’s father, John Jacob Astor, 1st Baron Astor of Hever, these being ‘about the only things a millionaire can’t buy in England – and I hear he was pleased, but that only improves prospects on the Times’.208 A year later he told Dorothy Pound that he had received an invitation from Astor and again couldn’t go.

  It’s wonderful what a little caviar & vodka will do to a millionaire oppressed by an inherited conscience. I think he looks on Ezra Horesh and Abufazle Solimani-Kashami as the picturesque figurines in the corner of a bleak canvas. It was a dark tea-house at the foot of a pass, in violent snow, surrounded by huge mountains. The lorry drivers were singing over their tea after lunch. Solimani had vodka, the place supplied opium, in every lull you could hear the unhappy jackals outside. A change from Carlton House Terrace & Cliveden. And the idea that Solimani, so little lawabiding, was a colonel of police, crowned Astor’s enjoyment.209

  He broke his journey to Throckley in London where Eliot was ‘invisible, wrapped in rehearsals’.210 ‘T.S.E. said to have become very frail,’ he told Zukofsky. ‘I’ve missed seeing him, unfortunately, in spite of his apparent anxiety for a meeting. It may be managed this month. I gather he has something to say or discuss that wouldn’t go adequately into writing. I’ve not seen him for several years and have no clue to what’s on his mind.’211 Perhaps he didn’t have much on his mind at all: ‘Eliot went off to the USA after feeding me at the Café Royal. Conversation rather more malicious than it used to be, but good.’212

  Poems 1950

  Bunting’s second collection, Poems 1950, was assembled by Dallam Flynn (or Dallam Simpson) and published in 1950 by Cleaners Press in Galveston, Texas. One of Pound’s disciples, Flynn published Bunting at Pound’s instigation. Bunting claimed that he had virtually no connection with its publication, but he told Dorothy Pound in April 1949 that he was busily typing up a ‘lot of stuff that isn’t in the Active Anthology to send him’.213 He certainly didn’t have much to do with it. It’s inconceivable that he would have missed the misprint he complained about to Zukofksy: ‘There are a number of misprints: few vexing. But the metamorphosis of fiends into friends is rather startling. Not a good omen, one would suppose. Perhaps the reverse would be worse.’214

  Asked by an interviewer many years later how he became involved with Flynn Bunting replied: ‘God only knows, I don’t. I was in Persia and thinking of anything rather than literature or poetry or publishing when I got a letter from Texas offering, nay begging, to be allowed to do a volume of my work and I saw no reason why not; and that’s all. I only set eyes on him once in my life, several years later.’215

  Faber and Faber refused to publish a British edition of Poems 1950 unless Flynn’s bizarre preface was removed. It features a sustained attack on John Berryman that seems to have no place in a preface to Bunting’s poetry, and is more or less unintelligible throughout. Flynn, for instance, claims that ‘The Complaint of the Morpethshire Farmer’ ‘in an instant explains away four centuries’ of decadent verse, and leaves us supporting a somewhat vapid bellows, from which, a rather pyrexial feline has just bounded’.216 Pound’s daughter (by Olga Rudge, not Dorothy), Mary de Rachewiltz, described Flynn as ‘mad as a hatter and physically a hybrid of Errol the actor, Red Eric and Ezra Pound’.217 Bunting, however, while not admiring it (he told Dorothy Pound that it completely baffled him218 and he told Gael Turnbull that when he saw Flynn’s preface it came as ‘a nasty shock’219), felt that, as Flynn had taken the trouble to compile and edit the book, the preface should remain. As a result, Faber and Faber never did publish Bunting’s poetry, an omission that should finally be rectified in 2014. Pound certainly felt that Eliot was at least partially responsible for Bunting’s neglect. In ‘Canto CX’ he explicitly linked it with The Waste Land:

  Bunting and Upward neglected,

  all the registers blacked out,

  From time’s wreckage shored,

  these fragments shored against ruin …220

  Hugh Kenner wrote a substantial review of Poems 1950 for Poetry, considering that ‘of these 54 pages some five may or should enter the corpus poeticum; a way of saying that Bunting’s subjects and treatment have an interest outlasting the age in which they were conceived’.221 Bunting was quietly pleased with Kenner’s review. He had seen the proofs and wrote to Dorothy Pound in August 1951: ‘not unintelligent reviews, though like most reviews of anybody, apt to chase irrelevancies (“influences”, “content”) and look only obliquely at the shape and texture of poems which are, after all, as much manufactured objects as a teapot or a dance tune’.222 Bunting was rightly sensitive about the apparently unavoidable mention of Pound’s influence on his work. As he frequently complained, if you grew up with Eliot, Yeats and Pound how could you not be influenced? It didn’t mean that you couldn’t have an individual voice.

  Louis Dudek described Bunting as ‘a gifted poet … who has been writing for twenty years without due recognition … The poems have real impact. Rarely, one reads a book which makes one, in desperation, almost give up writing. This is the effect of Basil Bunting … The whole poetry breathes a liberated personality that could not be smothered by any influence.’223 Vivienne Koch thought the collection moderately impressive although ‘one would be happier … had Mr. Bunting excused his prefacer, Mr. Dallam Flynn, from writing one of those Poundian and crack-pot essays which only the Master – who really had the wit – could bring off.’224 Thomas Cole celebrated Bunting’s ‘easy, fluent line’ and ‘bare beauty … It is difficult to believe that th
e poetry of Basil Bunting has gone uncollected until this excellent edition appeared … Bunting’s poetry can hold its own against any England has produced these past fifty years.’225

  We tend to see Poems 1950 as a failure (the literary world hardly noticed it) but it was an important milestone for Bunting, and he wasn’t entirely ignored in the 1950s. Selections of his poems were read on the BBC’s Third Programme in November 1954 and in July 1957.

  ITALY, 1950

  Bunting returned with his family to Throckley in May 1950 and stayed with his mother. He was offered a job by an Italian newspaper syndicate as foreign correspondent but lack of newsprint soon closed this opportunity and the following month they were back in the north east of England. Peter Quartermain suggests that when Bunting lost his job on The Times in 1950 he was immediately sent to Italy by the British Foreign Office ‘to stop a Russian takeover but some fool from the embassy met him at the plane and blew his cover’.226 He would have got this from Bunting and there is no way of verifying it.